Brit-ish: liminal belonging at the fracturing edge of people, place and planet

The heaviness of British

To be British is to carry a word that feels unbearably heavy right now. Flags painted on roads, fascism using the the shield of patriotism or nationalism enraging people to spill onto the streets, the endless hangover of Brexit, rights eroded, seas filled with sewage, marine protected areas continuing to face bottom trawling. It feels endless and overwhelming which ever way you turn. British identity and belonging, and the word ‘British’ itself, feels weaponised. It no longer sits neutrally, it tastes uneasy, co-opted, tainted by those who wield it like a weapon.

I don’t recognise myself in that version of Britishness. If I have to name it, I am Brit-ish and the ish matters. That small, liminal syllable is a refusal to be fixed. It acknowledges the soil beneath my feet, yes, but it resists collapsing into a single narrative of belonging.

Identity is never static

It is diverse, fluid, evolving. What it means to be British changes across time, across people, across place. My version of Brit-ish isn’t about flags or borders, it is about connection to people, to the land and to the wider planetary systems we are part of.

And here I need to pause and name the truth: to even wrestle with the meaning of being Brit-ish is already a position of privilege. I move through the world in a white body, holding relative passport power, my privilege shaped by centuries of supremacy and colonialism, systems that Britain itself exported and entrenched more overtly in the past, but still these structures oppress today.

To be Brit-ish is not just a matter of personal discomfort. It is entangled with empire, with extraction, with exploitation of people and planet. The wealth of this country, the very infrastructures now crumbling, was built through enslavement, stolen lands, fossil fuels ripped from the ground. To say Brit-ish is to acknowledge both the belonging and the complicity, both the home and the wound.

The roots of ish

Etymology matters. It’s where language quietly reveals the story beneath the story.

The suffix -ish comes from Old English -isc, itself from Proto-Germanic -iska, and ultimately from Proto-Indo-European -iskos. At its root, it meant of or belonging to. Englisc meant of the Angles, the people who lived on this island. Scottisc meant of the Scots. It was relational, never absolute.

Over centuries, English stretched the suffix into new shapes. Childish: having the qualities of a child. Foolish: carrying the traits of a fool. The meaning softened, no longer just “of or belonging to,” but “in the manner of, somewhat like.”

By the twentieth century, ish had slipped further still, becoming colloquial shorthand for approximation: Are you ready? Ish. Do you like it? Ish. Neither yes nor no, but a liminal maybe.

So built into the very fabric of English is this tiny syllable that holds approximation, ambiguity, refusal of certainty. Ish is belonging, but never complete. It is identity, but never fixed. It is relation without rigidity.

Which means to say I am Brit-ish is to align myself with that deep etymological truth. I am of this place, yes. But not wholly, not absolutely, not in the way this rising far-right gloved as nationalism would demand. Always, the nuance matters deeply and it sits with an ish.

The liminality of identity

Identity has never been fixed. Not here, not anywhere.

What we call “British” has always been porous and shifting. This country is an archipelago, Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, each with their own histories, some bound in union, others straining to separate. Even the word “United” in United Kingdom carries its own unease.

Add empire to the mix, and the fractures multiply. Britain’s fingerprints are global, etched through colonial histories that uprooted, displaced and imposed. For some, Britishness was forced; for others, it became a passport to privilege. For many, it meant both.

In every generation, “British” has meant different things. To the post-war Windrush generation, it meant arrival with promises, only to face racism and betrayal. Today’s migrants crossing seas in small boats, it is both hope and hostility, and to those in nationalist marches, it means a flag to cling to, a purity to defend. To me, it is Brit-ish: liminal, ambiguous, fractured.

Authoritarianism thrives on erasing that complexity. It takes something fluid and insists it is rigid, narrowing the story into one version, one definition, one banner. It says: this is what British looks like. This is who belongs, and this is who does not. That narrowing is how fascism takes root.

But the truth is, belonging is never singular. It is hybrid, layered, plural. To embrace Brit-ish is to refuse the fascist narrowing. It is to insist on nuance, to honour liminality.

Intersectionality and privilege

I cannot write about Brit-ish without acknowledging the intersectional web it sits inside.

My own positionality matters. I carry the privileges of whiteness, of holding a British passport, of being able to cross borders with relative ease. The ability to wrestle intellectually with “Britishness” is itself a luxury, because for many, identity is a matter of survival, not semantics.

Britain’s history is not neutral. It is steeped in colonialism, slavery, extraction. Enslaved people trafficked across oceans. Lands seized and stripped for resources. Economies built on the backs of others’ labour. All of it justified through white supremacy, the belief that some lives counted more than others.

That legacy lives on. Borders that criminalise migrants. Trade systems that drain the global South to feed the global North. Environmental destruction exported elsewhere while rivers at home choke on sewage. White bodies like mine move more easily through airports, police checks, job interviews, healthcare systems. That is the privilege I carry, whether I want it or not.

To be Brit-ish is to sit in that contradiction, to belong here, and to be complicit in the systems that harm elsewhere. To hold both the shame of empire and the possibility of reimagining belonging differently.

And the exploitation is never just of people. It is of planet too. Colonialism treated land as resource, oceans as dumping ground, forests as commodities, bodies as labour. The same extractive logic is alive in Britain today, in oil fields approved while climate burns, in rivers sold off to privatised water companies, in green spaces paved over for profit.

Brit-ish for me means refusing to accept that logic as normal. It means naming it, holding the privilege I carry, and seeking other ways of belonging, rooted not in extraction, but in reciprocity.

Patriarchy and severed wisdom

To talk about Britishness without naming patriarchy would be to leave out another fracture line that runs deep in these islands. These are Celtic lands, once steeped in goddess cosmologies, seasonal rituals and women’s wisdom of healing, midwifery, land stewardship and lunar time. Before empire and linear growth models, there were cycles honoured in the hands of women.

That wisdom was severed. Patriarchal power, entwined with church and crown, colonised knowledge. Witch trials burned healers, silenced herbalists, executed women whose crime was to hold power outside sanctioned structures. The very rhythms of the land, marked by solstice, equinox, harvest and sowing, were absorbed into rigid calendars and institutions that erased feminine cosmology.

Modern Britain still carries that wound. Misogyny threads through politics, pay gaps, violence, the policing of women’s bodies. The silencing of women is not a relic of history but a present reality. And it runs parallel to the colonial erasure of indigenous and feminine wisdom across the globe, all driven by the same patriarchal logic of domination and control.

To be Brit-ish is to feel that fracture too: a disconnection from the ancient feminine knowledge that once thrived here, and a longing to remember. The ish holds space for that remembering, for seeking belonging not in domination but in cycles, reciprocity and care.

People, place and planet

As a human geographer, I return always to the triad of people, place and planet. Each strand reveals the ishness of belonging.

People: There is no single British people. Identity here is hybrid, layered, plural. Accents shift every few miles. Food is a patchwork of global influences. Families are interwoven through migrations across centuries. To be Brit-ish is to belong to a web of multiplicities.

Place: Britain is not one monolith but an archipelago. Islands and peninsulas, coastlines carved by tides, moors and fens, industrial scars and urban sprawls. Each place carries its own story of belonging. “British” collapses that into one category, but the truth is Brit-ish: a mosaic of places, never uniform.

Planet: Borders are human fictions. The air we breathe flows across continents. Oceans carry currents beyond flags. Climate systems know nothing of national identity. To be Brit-ish is to remember that we belong to a planetary system that dwarfs our politics.

People, place and planet all whisper the same truth: belonging is relational, not absolute. It is liminal, approximate, ish.

Nature and cosmic belonging

We are not separate from nature. We are nature.

The iron in our blood was forged in the cores of stars, scattered when they exploded into supernovae. Every heartbeat carries the trace of cosmic fire. The water in our veins is the same water that once cycled through oceans, clouds and glaciers. We drink water dinosaurs drank. We breathe what trees exhale.

From that perspective, how absurd it seems to fight over flags. To argue over who belongs to a small island when our atoms themselves are universal. We are planetary beings, kin to rivers and stars alike.

To be Brit-ish is to lean into that absurdity and resist the nationalist narrowing. It is to remember that our belonging cannot be contained by flags or borders, because it flows through cosmic cycles far older than any of us can imagine.

The co-option of Britishness and the politics of distraction

And yet, while nature hums its quiet truth, politics churns its noise.

We watched marches erupt in response to the murder of a white man in another country, a name most had never heard until it was weaponised by media and politicians. Outrage manufactured and channelled into nationalism, a distraction carefully lit like tinder.

Meanwhile, our government is complicit in genocide. Millions starved, bombs funded by our taxes. Speaking out risks vilification, censorship, arrest. Protest itself is criminalised.

This is how distraction works. Anger is diverted into nationalism so it never turns on those truly responsible: billionaires and politicians who profit from collapse.

All of this unfolds in the hellscene of end-stage capitalism. Public services gutted. Sewage poured into rivers. Housing unaffordable. Wages stagnant. Climate spiralling. Obscene wealth for a tiny few, precarity for the many.

Division becomes a smokescreen. Nationalism is wielded by fascists to fracture us, to prevent us from uniting against the system that is devouring both people and planet.

Brit-ish is my refusal to be caught in that distraction. My insistence on naming the true culprits, not scapegoated migrants or groups marginalised by the mainstream narratives that these groups tactically create.

Story and storytellers

Beneath the marches, beneath the flags, there are always stories being told. Narratives fed to us day after day by media outlets owned by billionaires, by algorithms designed to enflame, by politicians who thrive on division.

Stories are never neutral. They are crafted, repeated, amplified until they feel like truth. Right now, the stories that dominate are the ones that pit neighbour against neighbour, migrant against citizen, human against human. Stories that blame the vulnerable while protecting the powerful.

This is not accidental. It is narrative architecture built to uphold a system where the wealthy few keep their power intact. When newspapers splash selective outrage across front pages, when television debates inflame culture wars, when social media amplifies hate, it is all part of the same machine.

But there are other stories. Stories that connect us to one another, to land, to sea, to sky. Stories that remind us of reciprocity, of interdependence, of cycles older than empire. To live Brit-ish is to choose which stories we give our attention to, which ones we amplify, and which ones we refuse.

Storytelling has always shaped identity. The question is: do we accept the ones propped up by billionaires, or do we reclaim the telling of our own?

Story in our times: speed, power and truth

We live in an age where information flows at lightning speed. Headlines race ahead of context. Tweets outrun research. Clips replace conversations. We’re constantly asked to decide what to believe before we’ve even had a chance to rest in what’s true. In this blur, the boundary between fact, story and perception becomes dangerously thin.

Media platforms are global empires. Owned by billionaires, shaped by profit incentives and engagement metrics rather than truth. They don’t always lie — but their structure rewards sensational stories, simplified narratives, emotion over nuance. They decide what to amplify, what to bury, what to repeat until it rings like fact.

There’s a brutally clear inequality here: just eight billionaires own the same wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population. Source – Oxfam. Wealth isn’t just about money; it means power. Power to shape what we hear, what we see, what feels “true”.

Constantly wading through this information overload is intense. The dissonance breeds weariness, apathy. It’s easier to fall into echo chambers, to take simplified stories as facts, to feel anger without asking deeper questions.

So I ask: who are the real story-shapers here? Who benefits when we’re divided, outraged, distracted? To live Brit-ish is to question not just what we believe, but who told us that belief. To discern where fact ends and fear, story, or manipulation begins.

The polarity of ish

Language itself mirrors this complexity. Ish is a hinge that holds contradictions. We use it in every day language to describe something ‘generally’…….

Foolish actions.

Childish behaviour.

Selfish intentions.

Clear-ish weather.

The -ish is ingrained in how we describe and navigate the world around us, but could mean a whole multitude of things and be interpreted completely differently to each and everyone of us.

Just like British.

Each shows how ish refuses singularity. It softens edges, opens thresholds, creates room for multiplicity. To live Brit-ish is to live in that tension, to accept polarity as part of belonging.

Towards re-imagined belonging

So what might belonging look like, if not in flags and rigid categories?

Brit-ish can be an invitation into connection. To reimagine belonging through reciprocity rather than domination, and reclaim ancient wisdom of cycles and care. To ground identity in nature’s systems, not political rhetoric.

This is not to deny privilege or erase history. It is to hold them honestly, to acknowledge complicity while choosing differently. To resist authoritarian narrowing, and instead widen our imagination of who and what we belong to.

Belonging that is planetary, not national. Cyclical, not linear. Rooted in equality, justice and care for people and planet.

Conclusion: remembering who we are

The ish is not a weakness. It is the gift. It is the refusal of certainty, the space of nuance, the threshold where possibility lives.

To live Brit-ish is to resist nationalist rigidity. To remember that we are people of many places, that we are part of a planetary system, that our blood carries stardust. It is vital that we see through the distractions of end-stage capitalism and remember who the real exploiters are.

And central to that remembering is story. Because story is how power operates, through media that inflames division, through narratives repeated until they masquerade as truth. These stories, propped up by billionaires, are designed to fracture us.

But story is also how we heal. Story is how we remember who we are. When we choose to tell different stories, rooted in reciprocity, in equality, in kinship with earth, sea and sky, we rewild belonging itself.

This is the work I am devoted to. Purpose-led visual storytelling that remembers, reclaims, reconnects. Work that refuses billionaire scripts and turns instead to nature’s narratives: cycles, awe, interdependence.

We do not need more worship of political figures propped up by elites, we need to remember who we are: kin to each other and to the living planet.

We need to live Brit-ish as the meaning of the word intends, liminal belonging — open, fluid, deeply human. A belonging that recognises one another, that roots us in care for people, in kinship with place, and in reciprocity with the planet we share.

That is the story I choose to tell. That is the story that might still save us.

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